Historical Theory

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Second, Hegel closed the gates on the further development of history by having it culminate in fact with the German kingdom and the bourgeois society of his own era. In each society, humans were 'free by nature' but constrained by their 'brutal recklessness of passion' and 'untamed natural impulses' which led to injustice and violence. The school of geopolitics makes geographical conditions in the shape of the heartland and the outlying regions into the paramount determinant of modern history. So long as social relations remain simple and stable, changing extremely slowly and almost imperceptibly over vast stretches of time, society melts into the background of nature and does not stand out in sharp contrast from it. Every type of state is a powerful institution of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to secure its rule and enforce its preferred relations of production and its exploitation onto society.

The immense powers attributed to the gods become transferred to and concentrated in some figure at the head of the state, the church or other key institution or movement. But a science of history capable of ascertaining the laws governing man’s collective activities over the ages is a relatively recent acquisition. The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory is an essential resource for practicing historians, and students of history, and will appeal to scholars in related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities who seek a closer understanding of the theoretical foundations of history.

The book is a lengthy polemic against Marx and Engels' fellow Young Hegelians and contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist. Against postmodernism, she argures that historical narratives are not simply inventions imposed on the past, and that some answers to historical questions are more plausible or adequate than others. The cyclical character of human affairs was closely affiliated with the conception of an all-powerful, inscrutable, inflexible Destiny which came to replace the gods as the sovereign of history. It has had numerous incarnations according to the values attached at different times by different people to the various domains of social activity.

The formation, reformation and transformation of social structures over the past million years cannot be understood by recourse to any supernatural beings, ideal agencies, petty personal or invariant causes. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. They were followed by a series of materialists in France in the 18th century such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Baron d'Holbach. This started with the overthrow of the absolute monarchy, passed through the revolutionary regime of Robespierre and the bourgeois-military dictatorship of Napoleon and ended in the Bourbon Restoration. As early as the eighth century BC the poet Hesiod talked about the copper age that had preceded the iron one.The editors introduce the core areas of current debate within historical theory, bringing the reader as up to date with continuing debates and current developments as is possible. From one generation to the next, technical skills, evolving traditions of practice and mechanical innovations are reproduced and disseminated.